I've not tried through-the-filesystem SSD benchmarks but a lot of the benchmarks out there are not through the filesystem either, it's just raw throughput to the disk.

Also I am a bit biased as I don't own non-Intel SATA3 (6Gb) interfaces yet (I'm using a Z68 and a Z77) and both of these are able to get > 500MB/sec to my SSDs (a Crucial M4-series and an Intel 520-series)._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

I've not tried through-the-filesystem SSD benchmarks but a lot of the benchmarks out there are not through the filesystem either, it's just raw throughput to the disk.

Also I am a bit biased as I don't own non-Intel SATA3 (6Gb) interfaces yet (I'm using a Z68 and a Z77) and both of these are able to get > 500MB/sec to my SSDs (a Crucial M4-series and an Intel 520-series).

Seems like the drive is bottlenecked by the SATA2. SATA2 is 3Gb/sec, that's 3Gbits/sec or around 300MBytes/sec (I usually use 10:1 ratio to account for serial overhead and ease of calculation, it's probably not THAT bad in real life but it's a rough guess). After this 300MB/sec limit I have to tack on another couple percent to get raw to-disk rates. I found that my ATA66 controllers top out around 50MB/sec and use a similar ratio with the 300MB/sec which gets me the 225-250MB/sec limit, which is about what you're seeing.

Sounds like you need to get SATA3 (6Gb/sec) controllers to realize the full speed of the disk. I don't even see the 500MB/sec through my Z68 board with SATA3 controllers through hdparm, but it clearly shows in gnome-disk-utility... pretty dang fast._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?